I’m feeling melancholy. Maybe it’s a belated fit of New Year’s Eve Auld Lang Syne. (A procrastinator can’t be expected to have fits on time.) Whatever it is, I’m missing some of the late great voices in blogspace.

Salam Pax (You have to change your browser prefs to a white background to see the writing….) Update: after crossposting at Shakesville, a commenter there pointed out that Salam is now here! Hurrah! He’s back!

If you'd like to read or comment on a synthesis of the ideas here, please check out my evolving work on government.
Pollution, privacy, abortion, net neutrality -- just about every controversy in modern life -- depends on correctly defining and understanding our inalienable rights.

Essential Information:

"What is the difference between a realist and a dreamer? The realist thinks that someday a UFO will come down and hover over the UN building, and that the aliens will come out of the UFO and offer to share their technology and solve all our world's problems.

The dreamer thinks maybe we can get our act together and do it ourselves."

Russian joke [It's a joke?] cited in William K. Hartmann, A Traveler's Guide to Mars.

Meta

Credits: Acid Test uses WordPress. Spam filtering and general junk defense by Akismet and Anti-leech. Rotating banner images php script from Dan Benjamin on A List Apart. Open source Piwik used to count site visits and their geographic location. (Google is getting too pervasive for my tastes.) No personal information of any kind is tracked or stored.